I want to use PHP with a server that i’ve coded my self. (Not Apache etc) I guess I have to send the http request and some additional data from my server to php, but I dont know how to make that connection and how to format that message.
I know I can run scripts with php.exe, the problem is that way it won’t work with php sessions.
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Answer
If you Google for the CGI specification, this will give you a reasonable idea of what environment variables to set up. Usually you exec the php process with the script filename as an argument, supplying it with the new environment variables. Are you familiar with fork, exec* system calls?
It’s a little more complicated than that, since it involves fiddling with standard input, output and error streams. To give you an idea, check out the thttpd source code, in the file libhttpd.c, function cgi_child.
If your server source code is not in C or C++, you will have to dig around for spawning a child process to handle the PHP script being called in your server, and send the output to the browser. Some of that output will be HTTP headers, and it may stop executing after that (e.g. HTTP 2xx no content, HTTP 3xx redirect) in which case you send that back to the browser with rnrn to terminate the output.
To send the information to the PHP process, just set up the environment and possibly argument variables unless the process reads the environment variable SCRIPT_FILENAME you set up (see CGI environment variables). Change into the directory where the binary is or into the document root, whichever makes sense, and before spawning, handle incoming data (e.g. from POST request) and let the spawned process read it from stdin (from php-fpm, it probably reads from the socket you set up, but not entirely sure, so that’s left as an exerciese).
It might be easier to run or spawn php-cgi which is php-fpm, which listens on a default or specified address and port. Run php-fpm -h for options and give it a whirl. This is definitely the way to go for session support I think. Also make sure the process knows where to look for the php.ini file.
As well as the CGI spec, it would be helpful to read all about HTTP. Or at least a good chunk of it.